Blind Five Year Old

There’s been a tremendous amount of chatter recently about rich snippets vanishing from Google search results, whether it’s Amazon losing their review aggregate snippets or a wholesale reduction in video snippets.

What we’re really talking about are changes to the rich snippets algorithm.

That’s right, we need to go deeper. There’s an algorithm within the algorithm.

Here’s what I know about the rich snippets algorithm based on observation and conjecture as well as statements from Google representatives. I’ll also sketch out some theories on how Google might be replacing many rich snippets with Knowledge Graph panels and carousels.

Rich Snippets History

Lets start at the beginning. Rich snippets were first introduced by Google on May 12, 2009. The strange thing is Google was the last search engine to embrace rich snippets.

For a long time Google didn’t want to employ a feature that would be naturally biased toward sites with greater development resources. In short, Google wanted to keep a level playing field. You still see some of this mentality in the Data Highlighter feature in Google Webmaster Tools.

But once they started down the rich snippets road Google all-in, launching Schema.org on June 2, 2011. Sure it’s a joint venture between search engines but lets be real, the main author here is Google.

Not Your Ordinary Result

Rich snippets are fancy results or results on steroids. They usually contain a visual element such as stars or a thumbnail image.

Whether they’re stars, additional links,  thumbnail images or video captures, these results stand out from the crowd. As such, they draw both the eye and clicks.

Whitelist Days Of Yore

In the old days (circa 2010) I was working with PowerReviews and, by proxy, a number of eCommerce companies who were chomping at the bit to get the review aggregate snippet on their results.

Those stars were extremely powerful in those early days. Anything shiny and new will have that initial heightened response. The review rich snippet is still valuable but less so now that the novelty has worn off and there are multiple review rich snippets per result.

At the time, it was all about interfacing with the ‘rich snippets team’ and getting them to ‘turn on’ your snippets. As rich snippets grew in popularity and expanded to new types this non-algorithmic approach was untenable and simply … un-Googly.

Rich Snippets Algorithm

It shouldn’t be a surprise that there’s a rich snippets algorithm. Google states it clearly in their rich snippets guidelines.

For a long time this algorithm was rather basic and disconnected from other search quality signals. It wasn’t until the release of Panda 4.0 that Google integrated search quality signals with the rich snippets algorithm.

That’s not entirely true. Prior to that they’d done something because the review aggregate snippets for one of my clients just up and vanished one day.

I scratched my head and for months in early 2014 had the team tweak the code and fix every stray microdata error or potential conflict that could be responsible for what I assumed was some markup confusion. But nothing worked. In frustration I gave up, cursed Google, and put it on the back burner.

When Panda 4.0 was released this client’s review aggregate snippets magically returned along with a huge boost in rank. At the same time, I had another client hit by Panda 4.0 who lost their snippets and saw the Panda-typical decline in rank and traffic. So it became crystal clear.

Site quality is now part of the rich snippets algorithm.

From Google’s perspective it makes perfect sense. If the search quality team believes the site isn’t very good then why would Google render a rich snippet that would draw more attention and clicks to results from that site?

What that means is Panda Jail produces a double whammy of rank reduction and rich snippet suppression.

Validating Rich Snippet Suppression

You can validate the rich snippets suppression by using the site: operator for a query that should be showing rich snippets but isn’t. Here is a search for ‘dr waldo frankenstein’.

The vitals.com result does not have a rich snippet. Using my structured data testing tool bookmarklet I can tell the page does have the review aggregate markup in place. So then we just perform the same query with a site:vitals.com prefix.

That’s the same page but this time the review aggregate rich snippet shows up. This is a clear case where Google is intentionally suppressing the rich snippet in normal search results.

Rich Snippets Relevance and Expertise

All of this doesn’t quite explain the big reduction in video snippets though does it? Many of the sites that lost video snippets weren’t Panda victims nor would you think they’d fall into some sort of non-authoritative bucket.

Casey Henry nails it in seeing the pattern. Those sites that are dedicated to video continue to get the video snippet. The algorithm seems to be looking for ‘topical’ expertise when rendering snippets. I don’t think Google wanted any ol’ site ‘hacking’ search results with a video result. (Yes, there was a cottage industry of folks doing this.)

I’ve seen this same ‘expertise’ issue occur on larger general interest sites. They may have received a recipe snippet before, but the new rich snippets algorithm decides not to render it because the site doesn’t have a focus or an expertise in recipes.

This expertise signal is a bit tough to pin down since there are other factors, such as overall site quality, involved. But it seems logical that Google is moving toward rendering snippets only when that site and snippet deliver relevance and expertise.

NASCAR SERPs?

The number of rich snippets per query might be a factor as well. Or if it isn’t, I think it will be soon. However, it is super dependent on the query.

For instance, search for ‘funny cat videos‘ and you get 8 video rich snippets, 7 of them from YouTube and one of them from Animal Planet. This makes a bit of sense since the query syntax makes it clear they’re looking for videos.

Sadly, a search for ‘funny cat‘ actually yields 10 video snippets, all from YouTube. I’ll give Google a pass with the query ‘funny cat’ since my guess is the overwhelming modifier is, in fact, ‘videos’.

So lets try the difference between ‘ombre hair’ and ‘ombre hair video’.

Sure enough you get just one video snippet with ‘ombre hair’ and a full 10 video snippets with ‘ombre hair video’. The only problem? They’re all from YouTube. In fact the first 15 are YouTube video snippets.

Look for a tweak to the rich snippets algorithm to dial back the YouTube host crowding issue. Even if YouTube is the most popular video destination it’s a public relations disaster to have it dominate to such an extent.

Similarly when you use ‘recipe’ in the query you get more recipe rich snippets. I’ve noticed that Google regularly removes the universal image result when you append the modifier ‘recipe’ to any ‘dish’ query.

This makes sense. When you use the term ‘recipe’ in your query you’re looking for, well, recipes.

Query syntax and intent have an increasing influence on search results design and configuration.

But there are times when site quality and relevance aren’t in question and the only reason the rich snippet isn’t rendering seems to be that there are already a number of rich snippets in the results.

The problem is I can’t locate a good example of this signal at the time of writing. I had some examples but now they’re not working as advertised. So am I just reaching here? Maybe, but I don’t think so.

Too Much Of A Good Thing

The concept makes sense and there are recent precedents to support it. Google tweaked the number of authorship images showing up prior to removing them completely. No one wanted to see face after face in their results and certainly not the same face multiple times.

User experience consistency was the reason given for the elimination of authorship images. There’s a prominent mention about cleaning up ‘the visual design of search results’.

In a Google+ Google Webmaster Central hangout shortly afterwards John Mueller (Webmaster Trends Analyst but really so much more than that) seemed to go a bit further and speak to the user experience decisions Google makes with regards to rich snippets.

So for example, if we were to show the authorship photo for all search results, then maybe that would be too much for the majority of the users, even if we had that information. So that’s something where, in the beginning when only very few sites implemented authorship, maybe it made sense to show them all. Maybe now that a lot of sites are implementing authorship, maybe it makes sense to reduce that, or maybe to switch over to the text-based annotation.

Now John is talking about authorship snippets specifically but it seems like this would apply to any visual element in search results. And this isn’t the first time Google’s dialed back images based on user testing and research. The first social annotations Google applied (those small faces under results) weren’t well received by users (pdf) and quickly disappeared.

When everything screams to be looked at, you look at nothing.

Mark Traphagen does a bang-up job teasing it out in his authorship post on Moz and was extremely helpful in pointing me at specific comments. Prior to full removal Google developed a sort of tiered class system for authorship snippets detailed by Mark in his Great Google Authorship Kidnapping piece on Stone Temple.

The first class received the thumbnail image and the second class only got a byline. This might have simply been about site quality and not about the total number of snippets in a result.

Yet coupled with the comments from John after the fact, it makes me wonder if it also served to test visual snippet density.

Choosing Favorites Is Hard

I think Google is concerned about making the results too cluttered. From the start Google has maintained a type of less is more approach. Just look at their home page.

So at some point it makes sense to me that only a certain number snippets would render per query result, varying by the topic and query syntax. But which results get the rich snippet would make a humongous difference and become a bone of contention.

Do the rich just get richer? Or does the one site that has more topical expertise get the snippet over a larger national brand?

Google hasn’t had to deal with this problem in large part because the adoption of markup has been slow. But as more sites add structured data, how does Google deal with search results with multiple visual elements?

Maybe they don’t.

Knowledge Panels Eat Snippets

As I investigated this topic and went down the rabbit hole I came across an interesting 2010 paper titled How Google is using Linked Data Today and Vision For Tomorrow (pdf). The focus of the paper was on using linked data in rich snippets.

First they looked at how much structured data was currently being used.

The result was a paltry 4.3% using any type of structured data and only 0.7% being used to generate rich snippets. A 2014 report from Searchmetrics indicates that the adoption hasn’t grown much in the intervening time.

But what’s more intriguing are the proposed ‘extended’ rich snippet examples.

What I can’t help think looking at these is how closely they map to new Knowledge Graph panels. It’s a bit like that old Reese’s Peanut Butter commercial. But here’s the thing. If this was a video from someone other than YouTube and it included links to another site’s content I think the first site’s head would explode.

“How dare Google put links to other sites in my result!”

You can’t think that someone like, say, Last.fm would be keen to have links to Wikipedia or ticketing sites in their result for an artist query. So moving all of that to a centralized location like the Knowledge Panel is almost a necessity.

Google Killed The Radio Star

I’m using Last.fm as an example because from what I can tell Google has eliminated the music rich snippet. I can’t even get one to render using a site: operator, which leads me to believe its been deprecated. If you can get one to render please let me know.

I’m going to use the music snippet example Google provides on their About rich snippets and structured data page.

The music snippet here is for Leonard Cohen and from the bold sections of the result I’m assuming the query used to produce it was ‘Leonard Cohen’.  Here’s what the Last.fm result looks like for that query today.

It’s the same URL but maybe Last.fm just screwed up their markup. I mean, it happens. So let’s run it through the structured data testing tool using my handy bookmarklet. (Seriously, it’ll shave hours of copy and paste work from your life!)

The markup is there. Google just chooses not to render it. Hey, those are the rules. And you can see why if you look at the Knowledge Panel in this search result.

The Knowledge Panel has a ‘Songs’ section and a new ad unit to listen to music on multiple platforms. Click on any one of those songs and you get a full blown ‘songs’ carousel result.

It’s pretty hard not to think this helps line Google’s pockets. It probably does.

The problem here is that sites don’t want competitive links in their Google search results and Google doesn’t want a long line of competing offers like some blinking-neon Las Vegas strip version of search results. Aggregating the various offers into one area of the page is a better user experience.

Knowledge Panels de-dupe, curate and aggregate intent for a better user experience.

The question then is how long until other types of rich snippets go the way of the Knowledge Panel?

Rich Snippets Ticket To Ride

Remember nearly 2,000 words ago when I mentioned Amazon had lost their review aggregate snippet. I took a screengrab of a specific instance of that about a week or so ago for my upcoming presentation on rich snippets.

Instead of focusing on Amazon look at the two other rich snippets on the page from Goodreads and Barnes & Nobel and how they also appear in the Knowledge Panel. Now lets see how this same search looks today (August 19. 2014).

Goodreads lost their rich snippet and with it their link in the Knowledge Panel. The Goodreads result changed to one doesn’t have the review aggregate snippets markup. That’s a kick in the pants!

The review aggregate rich snippet gets you access to the Knowledge Panel unit. At least for the book vertical. And if you didn’t realize, that link to Barnes & Nobel is … a link to Barnes & Nobel. External folks!

Google doesn’t play favorites in ordering. The order in the Knowledge Panel is dictated by the order they appear in search results.

I included the last one here to show that other sites do qualify if they get their review aggregate rich snippet on the first page. ManyBooks is 8th on the ‘accelerando’ result.

But looking further down the road might Google simply remove all the rich snippets and aggregate them in the Knowledge Panel unit? Or maybe they’d only do that if the query was more specific and contained the word ‘review’. On a lark I tried ‘blind assassin reviews’.

Will you look at that! Now both Goodreads and Barnes & Nobel have a starred result front and center. The rich snippets still show up in the individual results but it’s almost immaterial given this presentation. How about another?

All three sites that have review aggregate rich snippets on page one also get this monstrous book reviews unit. I don’t know about you but it certainly feels like change is coming.

It’s easy with books because there is one representation of this ‘work’. The connection between the entity represented in the snippet and the Knowledge Panel is straight-forward.

But there is not just one funny cat video! However, could you decide that there is one representation for a ‘dish’? Might a new recipe Knowledge Panel include one big image and links to individual recipes from sites using the recipe rich snippet?

It doesn’t seem so far-fetched to me.

Rich Snippets Redux

Pulling myself out of the rabbit hole here’s what I’ve learned.

The Rich Snippets Algorithm Got Smarter

The new rich snippets algorithm clearly draws on site quality signals and may also be looking for topical expertise. Sites impacted by Panda will see both a reduction in rank and a suppression of any rich snippets.

Query Syntax Changes Search UX

Google is adopting new user interfaces for query syntax that indicate specific intent. The number of rich snippets and other visual elements change based on certain modifiers. Knowledge Panels in particular serve to de-dupe, curate and aggregate user intent.

Rich Snippets Are Linked To Knowledge Panels

In some instances rich snippets are being deprecated in lieu of Knowledge Panels (such as music) while other times rich snippets provide access to prime Knowledge Panel real estate.

So while the landscape continues to shift beneath our feet I believe implementing structured data is one of the smartest moves you can make given Google’s clear and continuing efforts around entities, the knowledge graph and Knowledge Panels.

What if Twitter launched the most awesome analytics dashboard and no one really noticed? Well, that’s pretty much what happened nearly a month ago. I’ve been waiting for the posts that detail how much you can get from the tool and the different types of analysis you can perform.

But … I’m tired of waiting.

Twitter Analytics Dashboard

The dashboard provides a decent overview of activity over the last 28 days.

The major statistics it provides are Impressions, Engagements and Engagement Rate for each tweet and the trend for those over time. That’s not too shabby but lets poke at what lurks under Engagements.

Twitter Engagements

Click on a specific Tweet and you get to see how people engaged with that specific Tweet.

Now if you’re not quietly swearing under your breath at this point I don’t know what’s wrong with you. There’s so much awesome information here. A sliding scale of engagement for you to pour over.

In particular, you can see which Tweets produced User profile clicks and actual Follows. Not shown here but also tracked are the number of times the Tweet was Shared via email. But wait, we haven’t even gotten to the best part.

Export And Analyze

At the top right hand on the dashboard is an Export data button. This might as well be colored gold and in the shape of a treasure chest. Click and suddenly you have one of the richest sets of data you could wish for on your Tweets.

This eyesore of data is a goldmine. You get the actual text of each Tweet along with the timestamp coupled with all of the engagement metrics. So what could you learn from this data?

A bit of data manipulation and I can find out which days I have the most engagement.

Monday and Thursday for the small amount of time I have data. But maybe I just want to see the overall engagement rate by day.

Friday and Saturday suddenly look pretty good from an engagement efficiency standpoint. I could drill down here and get to the hour and come out with one of those popular ‘best time to Tweet’ posts if I wanted. But I won’t.

Twitter Analysis Smorgasbord

Instead I’ll look for better insights. I happen to use hashtags as a way to classify my Tweets. Two of the more popular ones I use are #seo and #ux. Now with a bit more data manipulation I can look at how these two different themes of Tweets perform.

I get a lot more impressions and engagements overall with the #seo hashtag but my engagement rate on #ux is twice as high. I could dig even deeper and do a pivot table to see what type of engagement I’m getting on each.

It’s hard to see, I know, but here I can tell that I get more retweets per Tweet on #seo but that many of the other metrics skew towards #ux in terms of engagement efficiency. This makes sense to me since I’m more of an authority in SEO than in UX. But it shows that with the right type of Tweets I am moving the needle in the latter. (Engagement efficiency – that has a nice ring to it doesn’t it?)

The analytic opportunities here are nearly endless. Particularly if you’ve adhered to some sort of pattern in your Tweets (thank you latent OCD).

So here I can see that my particular Tweet pattern of using a prefix gives me some interesting results. Do people pay more attention and interact with my Tweets when I say I’m saving the piece of content I’m referencing? Maybe. But there’s also a huge bias involved in the value of that content. Either way it’s something I can track over time.

So what are you waiting for?

How To Get Twitter Analytics

I think part of the problem is that the analytics feature is buried under the Ads interface. Maybe folks think you need to be running ads to get all of the organic Tweet data. That’s not true. I haven’t been running ads on my account. Never have. All I did was click the Get Started link and jump through a few hoops. Free!

If you’re having trouble check out Dan Shure’s post about how to set up Twitter Analytics on Evolving SEO.

Hopefully you’re ready to jump in with both feet and try this out. I know i’d appreciate others providing some insight and potentially some macros to make the analysis even easier. Step to it Excel gurus!

[Updated August 22nd, 2014] Dan Shure at Evolving SEO also has some tips on using Favorited Rate to predict content success.

[Updated September 24th, 2014] Paul Shapiro at Search Wilderness also pointed me at Twitter Analytics for Websites. I implemented this a month ago and have had it in a Chrome tab ever since. What’s cool is that it gives you information about everyone Tweeting about your website.

So implement both to gain insight into how both you and your site is performing.

TL;DR

Twitter is giving you an amazing dashboard and data on your organic Tweets that allows you to perform an insane amount of powerful social analysis.

For years I’ve used a combination of StumbleUpon and Google Remarketing to cheaply and efficiently open the top of the funnel for start-ups.

I don’t hear much about this tactic (though perhaps I’m not looking in the right places) so here’s a little explanation on this handy growth hack.

StumbleUpon

You remember StumbleUpon right? A darling of the Web 1.0 world, it was purchased by eBay in 2007 where it was largely ignored until it was bought back in 2009. It doesn’t get a lot of press but it’s still a well-trafficked property and product.

I’m not saying it’s in some sort of renaissance or anything. But it delivers traffic and has benefits many overlook.

Paid Discovery

You can buy ‘Stumbles’. That shouldn’t be news to you since you’ve been able to do that for ages. But … StumbleUpon has been overshadowed by other platforms so I often get a furrowed brow and a ‘you learn something new everyday’ response when I tell people this.

The paid StumbleUpon product is called Paid Discovery. Like nearly any paid ad product today you can target StumbleUpon users by geography, age, gender and interest. This is important since you only want to find people who are interested in your site or product.

The news gets even better because you can buy these targeted visits on the cheap from anywhere from $0.10 to $0.20 a click. It used to be cheaper but it’s still a bargain for guaranteed targeted visits.

Now, there is often some discrepancy between paid Stumbles and what shows up in Google Analytics due to various issues. You can obsess about this or simply shrug your shoulders and move on. I recommend the latter.

I figure I’ll make up the difference based on earned Stumbles, those StumbleUpon visits you get for free because your content has been well received.

Low Engagement

If you’re familiar with StumbleUpon you know that the product itself encourages low engagement. You ‘Stumble’ from one site to the next in a Tumblr for websites like fashion. It’s sort of like channel surfing on TV when you’re bored and looking for something interesting, yet not really having the time to watch for long anyway.

Marketers complain that StumbleUpon traffic has a 90%+ bounce rate and 1.1 page views per visit. And they’re not wrong. Here’s a look at the metrics for the campaign I launched to show how this works.

This is why most marketers write off StumbleUpon as a viable channel. Yet, if you’re creative, you can use the limitations of StumbleUpon to your advantage.

And I have, time and time again.

Forced Brand Exposure

The first thing to recognize is that StumbleUpon essentially forces visits to your site. This means you don’t have to deal with ad blindness or click-through rate issues to get exposure.

The problem with many StumbleUpon campaigns is that they don’t create a page that will work at a glance. Because it’s not about engaging on that visit. Don’t try to encourage an activity that is antithetical to the product. User engagement metrics should be largely ignored when using StumbleUpon.

The job of a StumbleUpon visit is to ensure that the user leaves remembering your site and what you’re offering. So the page has to be designed with five foot web design in mind and should be laser focused, passing any five second test with flying colors.

StumbleUpon is about getting brand and marketing message exposure.

You’re hoping that they’ll return later via another channel. I’ve seen strong correlations between an increase in direct traffic in the weeks after a StumbleUpon campaign. This would indicate that some people do remember that exposure and come back directly as a result.

But it’s awful hard to prove with all the mitigating factors.

Stumble Remarketing

The good news is that there is a better way to get those brand exposures to come back to your site. Remarketing!

All you need to do is set a remarketing tag on that specific StumbleUpon page and you suddenly have the ability to market to a specific and relevant group of people who already have a nascent idea of your site or product.

I like having a dedicated StumbleUpon campaign page so you can isolate this group from other groups when you’re doing more complicated remarketing campaigns. It’s just far simpler to manage and measure.

Easy To Set Up

It’s a snap to set this up now that you can create Google remarketing lists (aka Audience) using Google Analytics.

Here I’m simply targeting those users who visit my new search volume trend page. You do have to tweak your Google Analytics code to enable remarketing, which isn’t that hard if you’re willing to tinker. It’s even easier if you’re using Google Tag Manager.

Then you create your StumbleUpon campaign and watch as users ‘Stumble’ to your page and fill up your new Audience. At that point you can then go to AdWords and build a remarketing campaign using that Audience.

I won’t give the step-by-step instructions here unless there’s an outcry of folks for this level of detail.

StumbleUpon+Remarketing=Win

Even at $0.20 a visit I can take $5,000 and turn it into a list of 25,000 targeted users that I can target via remarketing for a loooong time.

Yes, the remarketing will also cost you some money but those clicks will be qualified clicks and will convert at a high rate. Not only that but if you’re smart you can use remarketing to gain extra brand exposures that produce additional view-through visits and conversions.

Stumble remarketing opens and fills your funnel with relevant users.

All you have to do is combine a remarketing tag with this targeted traffic source!

First This, Then That

My idea was to demonstrate this with a new page on my site dedicated to monthly updates to US desktop search query volume. I’ve tracked this metric for a long time and figured I would create a dedicated page for it and use StumbleUpon to announce and launch it. Then I’d use remarketing when the next month’s data was live and the graph was updated.

I screwed a few things up though so the test didn’t work quite as I’d planned. (User error!) And I haven’t seen new June numbers from comScore yet and was getting itchy to post this. But the idea was solid.

Have a defined plan behind the two exposures.

In my case I was looking to get people’s attention with one interesting graph and commentary. Then I’d bring them back with a remarketing ad when the graph was updated with a new month’s data. The ad could be the graph with a ‘see updated search trend’ call-to-action or any number of creative treatments. In a best case scenario I would also have created a subscribe option for the page itself once users got there again.

If you have a product you’re trying to sell you might have the first ‘Stumble’ exposure introduce the product and brand. The second ‘remarketing’ exposure could be a benefit message, a free white paper download or a coupon for a product trial. In some ways the first exposure is advertising and the second is marketing.

You’re a marketing boxer hitting users with a combination one-two punch.

TL;DR

By combining StumbleUpon Paid Discovery with Google Remarketing you can quickly and efficiently open and fill the top of the sales funnel. Use StumbleUpon’s low-engagement context to your advantage and deliver a memorable first impression that you then build on through additional remarketing exposures.

Infographics are (still) popular. Clients ask me about them all the time. I ask them to tell me about the last three infographics they remembered.

The response is generally full of stammering as they grope for an answer. Rarely do I get specifics. Even when I do they say things like ‘that infographic about craft beer’. When I ask where the infographic came from? Crickets.

Can you name the brands associated with infographics? The brands that come up most often are Mint and OK Cupid. Everyone else is an also ran. And that’s the thing. For all of their popularity, you won’t remember that infographic.

Or, at least, you won’t remember it the right way.

Triangle Of Memory

To understand why infographics are so problematic we need to look at how we remember content.

The triangle of memory is a variant of the project management triangle that includes better, faster and cheaper attributes, of which you can only have two at any given time. You can have a project fast and cheap but it won’t be better. You can have a project fast and better but it will cost you an arm and a leg.

In terms of memory, we don’t have a massive tag based annotation system in our brains. (That’s what Delicious is for.) Instead, we remember content at a very basic level: site, author and topic. This is why I tell clients to make their content cocktail party ready.

Because you remember ‘that post on Moz about Hummingbird‘ or ‘Danny Sullivan’s analysis of New York Times subscription costs‘.

It’s site and topic, but not the author. It’s author and topic but not site. Rarely it is author and site but not topic. Examples of this might be ‘the latest column by Krugman in the New York Times’ or ‘last week’s episode of John Oliver on HBO’.

I’m not saying you never get all three. You hit the three cherries jackpot once in a while. But it’s rare. Counting on it is like counting on winning at the casino game at https://www.bettingnews.com/.

The Infographics Monster

The problem with infographics is that they destroy the triangle of memory. They gobble up one of those three memory attributes leaving you with only one left to use. It’s always ‘that infographic’. And like it or not the attribute most people select is the topic, resulting in the phrase ‘that infographic about …’.

That means your site or brand disappears! And no. No one remembers (and may not even see) your logo that you’ve slapping on there.

‘That infographic about AdWords conversion rates’ is done by who exactly? Where do I find it again? Ah, never mind. Or worse yet they search for it and they find something or someone else instead.

If users don’t remember that it’s your brand or site, have you really succeeded?

Wasted Attention

Not only are infographics often costly (both in time and money) but you’ve wasted that sliver of attention you’ve worked so hard to earn.

Here you’ve got the eyeballs of a user and they leave without remembering who you are or where they saw it. Heck they might even attribute it to the platform where they discovered it such as Facebook, Pinterest or Google+.

Winning the attention auction isn’t easy and when you do win it you better ensure you’re using that attention wisely. I’d argue an infographic is wasted attention. It’s attention without any lasting value. It’s empty (branding) calories.

When Infographics Work

By and large I steer clients away from infographics and prefer to have them work on other content initiatives where they’ll build brand equity. But that’s not to say that infographics can’t work. They can. But it takes a serious commitment and attention to execution.

Doing one or two infographics is like flushing a fist full of hundred dollar bills down the toilet. If you’re going to do infographics, do infographics. Commit to producing one every month for 18 months.

Consistent engaging infographics is what makes your brand stick. It’s why Mint and OK Cupid succeeded where so many others failed.

I’d also argue that infographics must make users LOL or OMG. If they don’t provoke one of those two reactions then you’re not going to gain traction or attention.

The other way to go is to leverage the infographic into other channels and make it repeatable. Search Engine Land’s Periodic Table of SEO Success Factors (a bit of a mouthful) was printed and handed out at SMX Advanced and has been updated three (?) times now.

It’s an iconic piece pushed through multiple marketing channels to reinforce the site and brand. That’s how you do it.

Don’t Talk To Me About Links

I know some of you are about flexing your fingers about to type out a comment about how your infographic obtained 12 links with an average DA of 49.

Links aren’t the goal of your infographic campaign. Your customers don’t care if you’re on some cheesoid infographic aggregator site. Instead I want to know if that infographic won the brand more true fans. Did it increase the brand’s visibility? Because those things will lead to long-term authority and, by the way, downstream links.

If you’re in such desperate need of links there are far better and cheaper ways to earn them than the branding black hole known as the infographic.

Visibility

Another argument for infographics is that they provide you with more visibility. If I see an infographic and then I see a Slideshare deck and then I search and I find a blog post over the course of weeks or months, then perhaps the brand or site begins to sink in.

In principle, I agree. But that only works if I associate that infographic with the other pieces of content and that I have those other pieces of content, which all support my site or brand.

In other words, you better have a comprehensive content strategy (including promotion) that doesn’t rely on just one tactic or medium. I like Jason Miller’s idea around Big Rock Content, though I think the missing ingredient is being memorable.

TL;DR

Infographics are a poor way to build your brand and earn true fans because they destroy the triangle of memory. A successful infographic campaign must be part of a larger content strategy, focusing on repeatable efforts that make people LOL or OMG and can be pushed through multiple marketing channels to reinforce the site or brand.

Do social signals (Tweets, Likes and Pluses) impact search rankings? The answer to this question is yes, but not in the traditional sense. That’s why so much misinformation exists on the topic.

So before you run off and get all your friends to Tweet your post (or worse yet buy Likes etc.), read on to understand the math and real reason why social works.

Social Signals Are Not Part Of The Algorithm

No matter how much we want it, or how many times we think it would make sense, it’s just not happening.

Social is not currently part of Google’s search algorithm.

At SMX West 2014 Amit Singhal stated that Google+ doesn’t have an impact on the relevance of non-personalized search results. (I was there and heard those words come out of his mouth.)

That’s the head of Google’s search effort telling you that they’re not even using their own social signals to improve search. So they sure as heck aren’t using Twitter or Facebook, sources in which they have less visibility and trust.

Using social signals in the algorithm is wicked hard for a number of reasons. While I’m sure smart people at Google and Bing are working on ways to use them, they aren’t currently being used. Period. End of story.

But … Correlation!

Of course you’ve seen all the correlation studies that seem to show that social improves rankings. Now, the thing is, social is correlated with improved rankings, just as ice cream consumption and amount of clothing worn are correlated.

The key is to find the confound or confounding variable, that thing that explains why those two things are correlated. In the case of ice cream and clothing the confound is (of course) temperature. This is what is generally missing in the conversation around social signals and SEO.

Finding The Confound

It’s not the actual social activity that matters, but what happens as a result of that activity. 

One of the best things that can happen is if your content is seen by creators, the 1% of users who create all the content floating around the Internet.

Before we continue, you might want to acquaint yourself with the concept of participation inequality, something I talk about frequently, most recently as it relates to blog commenting. Because I’m going to mash-up social, participation inequality and the link graph to make my point.

Creators power the link graph and that’s why social can be so important if you follow the math.

Social SEO Math

Say I get 100 Tweets on a blog post. Those 100 Tweets are seen by 10,000 people. I’m using round numbers here to make the math easier. But the idea is to understand the reach of those social shares.

If we use the standard distribution of participation inequality we determine that 1% of those 10,000 people are creators who might decide to include your brand or site in a future piece of content.

So, if 10,000 people see your content and (on average) 1% of those are creators then you’ve reached the eyeballs of 100 creators (10,000 x 1%), the folks who power the link graph.

Some of those creators will follow through and include you (links and mentions) in their content. It’s something I’ve referred to as the ‘Social Echo‘ in the past. But how do we measure and steer our efforts with this math in mind?

All Social Shares Are Not Equal

Does the share from your buddy with 10 followers (half of which are actually accounts for his pets) mean as much as a share from an industry leader with 20,000 followers? Of course not.

This is one of the reasons why buying Tweets or Likes just for the sake of pumping up that number is a waste of money. Shares that fail to find an audience with the appropriate creator mix will do nothing for SEO … or your marketing efforts in general.

Even the size of the following might not help you. It all depends on the creator mix.

For instance, 50,000 followers with a creator mix of .1 (a tenth of a percent) would only give you the opportunity to get in front of 50 creators. On the other hand, 10,000 followers with a 3% creator mix would give you the opportunity to get in front of 300 creators. (Note to self. Someone should come up with a way to quantify the creator mix of someone’s followers.)

The caveat here is that some of those 50,000 followers might re-share that content and they might have a better creator mix and get you to more creator eyeballs. You can see how this can quickly get complicated.

Long story short, the number of creators following someone who shares your content is important.

Did They See It?

You’ll notice that I say that you have the opportunity to reach a certain number of creators with those social shares. But there’s no guarantee that those creators actually see that one specific share amid all the other content passing through their social feeds. And there’s an argument here that creators might be more difficult to reach based on their time constraints.

So while I’m not in love with the idea of timing your social shares, it actually make a bit of sense. Because you want to maximize the potential for creators to see your content. Be warned, this is highly dependent on your vertical and will change over time so don’t get lazy and rely on cookie-cutter data.

You must win the attention auction. That means optimizing your social snippets, using paid organic amplification to get things off the ground and sharing your content more than once (second chance Tweets etc.) among other things. At the end of the day you want to do everything you can to ensure creators are seeing your stuff.

Optimize and maximize creator impressions.

Creator Conversion Rate

The last variable in the equation might be the most important one of all – the percentage of creators who wind up linking to you as a result of a social impression.

So lets go back to my initial math: 100 shares produce 10,000 impressions of which 1% or 100 are creators. How many of them are going to do something with your content that will impact the link graph?

I don’t have any hard data on this and, frankly, it is super dependent on the content. Really awesome content that’s relevant, timely and memorable might have a high conversion rate. Content that makes creators roll their eyes and curse themselves for clicking through in the first place may not get a single link.

I tend to use a 1% conversion rate when discussing this with clients. So in my example, those initial 100 shares would net 1 link.

That’s it folks. Links are the confound in the correlation between social shares and rankings.

Content that hits that sweet spot, getting a high number of shares that creates downstream links from creators (particularly in a short period of time), produces wildly successful results. Those additional references by creators often creates a tailwind of sharing on the original content, reinforcing the correlation we all recognize exists.

Fuzzy Math

Now, I’ve provided math on why I believe social is a valuable part of SEO. Downstream links matter. No doubt about it.

But it’s more than just a mathematical equation of links. Social drives more people to your site who might convert and become a reader or customer. Those people might wind up sharing in the future and the traditional math above kicks in again.

You’ll gain additional followers and true fans who help to distribute your future content. Guess what? You’re just optimizing the top of the Social SEO funnel. More shares lead to more impressions lead to more creator impressions and more opportunities for gaining authoritative references (i.e. – links).

You also might get more direct traffic as a result, as the mere exposure effect takes hold and they begin to associate you with specific topics and visit your site as needed. Even this could probably be reduced to math if you really wanted to go down the rabbit hole.

Good things happen when your brand is seen by more people.

TL;DR

Social has an indirect but powerful impact on search rankings. It’s not the actual social activity that matters, but what happens as a result of that activity. Optimizing and maximizing creator impressions increases the chance of obtaining links from the group of people who power the link graph.

Blog commenting is the not-so-secret weapon to building your brand and authority. I’m not talking about comment spam or finding do follow blogs and littering them with links. No, the blog commenting I’m talking about lets you cut through the clutter and tap into the attention of creators.

Participation Inequality

To understand why blog commenting is so powerful you first need to grasp the concept of participation inequality.

In most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action.

You might also hear this concept referred to as the 90:9:1 Principle or The 1% Rule. You could even stretch a bit and mention the Pareto Principle in this discussion. The idea here is that the vast majority of people lurk and never participate. They are consumers of content.

A small minority, the 9%, may comment, share or participate in other ways. But it’s the 1% left that actually create the content that is consumed. When I explain it to people I refer to these groups as lurkers, reactors and creators respectively.

What’s surprising (to me at least) is that many people still haven’t caught on to this idea. They remain shocked and appalled that 90%+ of Yelp reviews come from 1% of users. They use low activity (defined as contributing) on services like Twitter and Google+ to argue that they’re not viable.

Now what type of person do you think was more likely to sign up and use Twitter back in 2008?  Lurker, reactor or creator? Give yourself a gold star if you answered creator. And that’s why the percentage still Tweeting from those years is higher. As the service became more mainstream, more lurkers joined the service.

And that’s okay!

Trying to ‘fix’ participation inequality is a losing battle against human nature. Most people simply aren’t going to create content for a wide variety of reasons. Sure, technology may slide the percentages a small amount but material changes to this dynamic won’t happen.

Creators

If creators are responsible for nearly all of the content we consume, that makes them … pretty powerful. I dare say, you might call them influencers. Now, I don’t particularly like that term but there’s a certain amount of truth in it.

The sad thing is that most of the ‘influencer outreach’ content I’ve seen talks about how to identify (zzzzzz) and email these people or ways to interact with them on Twitter. I suppose that can work once in a while but the odds of securing their attention in these ways is limited and inefficient.

People continue to do this type of outreach because of the huge upside in gaining the attention of a creator. Creators often have a large audience so a mention or link in the content they create can provide a real boost to your brand and authority.

If you didn’t put the pieces together already, creators power the link graph.

Attention

Attention is at a premium and it’s your job to win the attention auction as many times as you can. It’s even more important to win the attention of creators. Yet, creators may have a more limited amount of attention to give. Why? They’re busy creating content! Seriously, it takes time (and lots of it) if you’re doing it right.

Not only that but if they’re a successful creator, the demands on their time increase. They get more email, more requests, more clients.

So how do you get the attention of a creator? Funny thing, there’s actually a really easy way to hack the attention of a creator. That’s right. Blog commenting.

You know that creators are going to be paying attention to the comments on their content. They worked hard to produce it and they’re looking to see how it’s received. Make no mistake, creators thrive on feedback and validation.

Creators hang out in the comments section. So take advantage of the implicit focus creators have on comments.

Blog Commenting

The problem with blog commenting is that most people suck at it. I’m not even talking about the cesspool of comments that often overwhelms YouTube videos or the comment spam with their ever present and overly complimentary prose clogging up moderation queues.

Commenting is your chance to get the undivided attention of that creator, if only for a few seconds as they determine whether the comment is interesting.

“Nice post. Very helpful.”

Is that comment interesting? Nope. Is it memorable? Nope. Comments like this do absolutely nothing for you. In fact, if a creator associates you with these types of moronic bland comments, you reduce your chances of securing their attention in the future.

Remember, attention is a habit. You figure out which people are worthy of your attention and which are not. The more times I choose not to pay attention to you, the more likely I am to do that in the future.

When you comment, your job is to add value to that content. That means you come with an opinion and point of view. You come with other related content that you’ll link to in your comment. Those links should not always be to your own site. No one likes the person who always talks about me, me, me.

Most creators want a reaction. They want a debate. They want a conversation. They want to learn. They want to be challenged. They want to be mentally stimulated.

Who Is This Person?

If you’ve done your job right and provided a comment that engages the creator, a thought bubble should appear over their head reading ‘who is this person?’

At that point they’re clicking on the links in your comment or on the ‘site’ link you provided in the comment meta that’s on nearly every comment platform.

A good comment gets a creator curious about that person.

They click around and do some research. Maybe you have a blog yourself and they read your latest post (or more). Maybe they like it enough they add it to their RSS reader or they find your Twitter handle and follow you there.

Of course this means you need those exploratory clicks to land somewhere that showcases your brand. Don’t make the mistake of leaving a great comment and then have the creator come through to a site that hasn’t been updated in over a year or a half-ass product page with a broken image.

If you’ve engaged the creator enough to garner more attention, don’t squander it with poor content assets.

Putting It All Together

I’ve been wanting to write this post for a few months but it wasn’t until I bumped into Larry Kim (who is a great guy) at SMX West that everything fell into place. I was chatting with Larry about this topic and he gave me a perfect example of the power of blog commenting in practice.

On February 25th the talented Elisa Gabbert compiled the opinions of SEO experts on the ‘dwindling value of links‘ (bollocks, but that’s another story.)

The post was popular and garnered 37 comments, many from other notable creators. One of those was a very comprehensive comment by Russ Jones from Virante.

On February 28th (three days later) the indomitable Rand Fishkin released a Whiteboard Friday video that not only linked to the Wordstream post but referenced comments by Russ Jones.

And if you watch the video or read the transcript it’s crystal clear that Rand has read the comments. Heck, he uses them as the basis for a material amount of this video! It might have been nice if Moz had also linked to Virante but c’est la vie.

Do you see what just happened here!? Have I convinced you how powerful blog commenting can be in getting the attention of creators? That those creators can then provide your brand, site or product exposure by including them in their content.

But … Reasons Excuses

I know some of you are going to complain that blog commenting like this is too time consuming. Oh? Can I offer you some cheese for that whine?

Seriously! There are few better ways to interact with creators. Not every one will result in a mention or link in three days time but done right you’re going to build your expertise and authority with the ‘right’ people.

Would you rather send out a bunch of email pitches to influencers which are essentially interruptions and attacks on their attention or instead build lasting content assets (comments my friend) while gaining exposure with said influencers? Choose wisely.

Others are rightly frustrated with comment censorship, both human and algorithmic (i.e. – spam filters). But the answer is not to remove comments (and chase away creators) but to figure out a better way to have these discussions.

TL;DR

A small amount of creators are responsible for the vast majority of the content we consume. They have a limited amount of attention yet wield a lot of influence through their ability to reference sites, products, brands or content in the content they produce.

Creators hangout in (aka devote their attention to) the comments section of their content and that of others. Thus, memorable blog comments that provoke creator curiosity (and clicks) build your authority and improve your chances of gaining a mention or link in their content in the future.

Each year my wife and I take our daughter to the Chevron Family Theatre Festival at the Lesher Center for the Arts. It’s a great local tradition where kids sit on stage during fairy tale plays, get their face painted and eat ice cream among other things.

Last year we also saw The Pushcart Players, a smaller touring group, put on Stone Soup and Other Stories. They were excellent. Not only that but the Stone Soup fable they performed was new to me and, oddly, fit my view of SEO.

Stone Soup

The Stone Soup story is “an old folk story in which hungry strangers persuade local people of a town to give them food.” The scene opens with a traveller going through a Russian town way back when. In this instance the traveler is acquainted with the townspeople but it’s been a hard year. Everyone is hungry and they’re in no mood to share.

The traveller sets up his pot, puts water and a stone in it and gets a fire going, telling the passing townspeople that he’s making delicious Stone Soup. The townspeople are super curious (and hungry) so he promises to share the recipe if they help him make it.

He’s got them hooked! So as he’s stirring the traveller says “Well, you know what makes Stone Soup even better? Carrots.” And a townsperson runs off to fetch a carrot which is added to the soup.

Then the traveller says, “But, you know what else makes Stone Soup great? Onions.” And so another townsperson runs off to fetch an onion. The pattern continues with the traveller asking for a potato and finally a chicken until the Stone Soup is truly a delicious and hearty soup.

SEO is the stone.

SEO is Stone Soup

Watching and listening to the story I was struck that the way I approach SEO is just like Stone Soup.

A client might come to me for what many might think of as traditional SEO, including technical issues, keyword research, on-page optimization and (the dreaded) link building. But as I work with a client I take on the role of the traveller.

You know what would make your SEO even better? Some conversion rate optimization. Even more so? Focusing on user experience. Oh, and do you have an email marketing program? No? Oh, well that’s critical. You’re doing social right? How about remarketing? No! Well that’s a no-brainer. Have you looked at these business development opportunities? Can we talk about your product? And lets start promoting benefits instead of features, okay?

The list is pretty long and at the end of the day SEO is simply digital marketing.

Why Sell SEO?

If SEO is just digital marketing why do I continue to sell SEO? That’s how my clients talk about this problem! I’ve done my intent and user syntax research.

Honestly, I don’t really care what we call ourselves. All of the above terms are just fine and you might have found a way to use other terms to sell your services. Awesome! More power to you.

But in my experience, when people are looking for help with their business (aka more traffic) they often use the term ‘SEO’ as a proxy. So I want to be there when those clients come knocking.

In the end it doesn’t matter what was said about SEO on The Good Wife. It only matters how prospective clients talk about and express this intent. Because the intent behind those looking for SEO matches what I offer, whether they realize it or not.

Baggage

There’s a tremendous amount of angst around the ‘baggage’ that comes with the term SEO. People say that the mainstream thinks of us as spammers. That the term SEO is toxic.

Every objection is an opportunity.

That’s what I used to tell my employees when I ran telemarketing programs at George Washington University, American University and UCSD. One of my jobs was to arm my callers with answers to predictable objections.

Objection: “The university doesn’t need any more money. They get plenty from the state of California.”

Response: “Actually, the amount the university gets from the state has dropped from 80% to 20% in the last 10 years. We need your help more than ever.”

I’m not sure I have the facts right here but it’s something like this and you get the gist of it, right? When someone raises an objection it’s actually an opportunity to have a dialog.

Why not use that to your advantage?

Predictability

One of the other reasons I still use the term SEO is that the questions (or objections) I’m going to get are predictable. I can anticipate the questions and can have great answers to them ready to roll off my tongue or fingertips.

I’ve used this technique in many places. For instance, what do you think one of the most frequent questions is about Blind Five Year Old? The name! So I get to tell them about my philosophy of SEO right away. #winning

Back in the day, I left a gap in employment on my resume knowing that a good interviewer would ask me about that gap. I had a great answer lined up. And I’d rather talk about what I want to talk about rather than leave everything up to chance.

Same thing when you’re creating a pitch deck. Engineer the presentation so that you can anticipate the questions! I’m not saying look like an idiot. Just be smart and you’ll increase your odds of getting the questions you want to answer.

So with the term SEO I know a lot of the questions are going to be about spam, links and other dated techniques. I have my answers. Not only that but I can qualify clients by how they respond to my answers.

Marketing

In the end I approach things as a marketer. I’m using what is sometimes referred to as a bowling pin strategy. I’m following the user syntax of my clients and matching their intent.

I know the funnel is going to be dirty, chock full of the misinformed working off of 2007 rank-fast SEO tactics. But it’s a ginormous funnel that isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. So my job is to quickly find the diamonds in the rough.

Mind you, I no longer have to do a lot of this since nearly 100% of my business comes via referrals. But I got to this point using the strategy outlined here and hope I’d do it again (nearly) the same way if I were starting from scratch.

TL;DR

SEO as a profession is much larger than the specific acronym indicates. Yet, SEO remains a powerful term because of user behavior and intent, providing an opportunity to deliver other important digital marketing techniques to a larger audience. So I sell SEO as if I’m making Stone Soup.

A few months ago I offhandedly made a reference to KGO which stands for Knowledge Graph Optimization.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. We need another acronym like another hole in the head! But over the past year I feel like there are a set of tactics that can help you optimize your site’s connection to the Knowledge Graph. And that can yield material gains in search visibility.

The Knowledge Graph

Here’s a brief explanation from Google for those not familiar with the Knowledge Graph.

The Knowledge Graph enables you to search for things, people or places that Google knows about—landmarks, celebrities, cities, sports teams, buildings, geographical features, movies, celestial objects, works of art and more—and instantly get information that’s relevant to your query. This is a critical first step towards building the next generation of search, which taps into the collective intelligence of the web and understands the world a bit more like people do.

It’s about searching for things instead of strings. Or without the rhyming, it’s about entities instead of text.

Take the query ‘Golden State Warriors’. From a string stand point you’d be looking at the individual keywords which might be confusing. Now, Google got extremely good at understanding terms that were most frequently used together using bigrams and other methods so that this query would yield a result about the NBA basketball team.

But with the Knowledge Graph Google can instead identify ‘Golden State Warriors’ as an entity (a thing) that has a specific entry in the Knowledge Graph and return a much richer result.

Pretty amazing stuff really. (Go Warriors!)  Hummingbird was largely an infrastructure update that allowed Google to take advantage of burgeoning entity data. So we’re just getting started with the application of entities on search.

Entity Challenge

You need only look to the Entity Recognition and Disambiguation Challenge co-sponsored by Microsoft and Google to see the writing on the wall.

The objective of an Entity Recognition and Disambiguation (ERD) system is to recognize mentions of entities in a given text, disambiguate them, and map them to the entities in a given entity collection or knowledge base.

Can it be any more clear? Well, actually, it can.

The Challenge is composed of two parallel tracks. In the “long text” track, the challenge targets are pages crawled from the Web; these contain documents that are meant to be easily understood by humans. The “short text” track, on the other hand, consists of web search queries that are intended for a machine. As a result, the text is typically short and often lacks proper punctuation and capitalization.

Search engines are chomping at the bit to get better at extracting entities from documents and queries so they can return more relevant and valuable search results.

So …

But what exactly are we supposed to do? There has been little in the way of real rubber-meets-the-road content that describes how you might go about optimizing for this new world full of entities. One of the exceptions would be Aaron Bradley’s Semantic SEO post, though it mixes both theory and tactics.

Now, I love theory. That’s pretty clear from my writing. But today I want to talk more about tactics, about the actual stuff we can do as marketers to affect change in the Knowledge Graph.

Nouns

The first thing we can do is make sure we’re using the entity names in our writing. That ERD challenge above? Well, the systems they’re designing are looking to extract entities from text.

So if you’re not using the entity names – the nouns – in your writing then you’re going to make it vastly more difficult for search engines to identify and match entities. This does not mean you should engage in entity stuffing and mention every associated entity you can think of in your content.

Write clearly so that both humans and search engines know what the hell you’re talking about.

Connect

Stop hoarding authority and ‘link juice’ by not linking out to other sites. The connections between sites and pages are important and not just in a traditional PageRank formula.

I think of it this way. The entities that are contained on one page are transmitted to linked pages and vice versa.

Entities are meta information passed in links.

Structured Data

You can make the identification of entities easier for search engines by using schema.org markup along with some other forms of structured data. Not only will this ensure that the number of entities that are transmitted via links increase, it can often make connections to the Knowledge Graph with a very limited amount of data.

Google Maps Entity Hack

So, here’s the actual bit of discovery that I’ve been holding onto for six months and is the real impetus for this entire post. If you go to Google Maps and search for a branded term coupled with a geographic location you often get some very interesting results. Take ‘zillow san diego, ca‘ for instance.

Look at all those results and red dots! I didn’t ask for realtors, mortgage brokers or appraisers in my query. I simply used the term Zillow in combination with a geography and got these very related and relevant results. They’re not simply looking for a Zillow office located in San Diego.

So, lets look at the details here to see what’s going on. I’ll take one of the red dots and investigate further.

So why is this on the map results? First I go to the linked website.

So, there are no links to Zillow anywhere on the site and the address and phone number here don’t match the one on Google Maps. But they are the ones listed on his Zillow Profile.

Now the link to the website closes the connection here so it’s not completely linkless, but I still find it pretty amazing. And this is without Zillow fully optimizing the markup. They declare the page as an organization.

But they don’t detail out the professional information with schema markup.

Instead they’re using some old(er) school definition list markup for list term and description. Combined with the organization scope it looks like Google can put 1 and 1 together.

Google+

In doing due diligence I found Mesa Pacific Mortgage also has a Google+ page which reinforces the right address and phone number. So the connection isn’t as startling as it might seem but it’s still intriguing.

And I have no idea in what order these things came into existence. It’s pretty clear the Zillow listing probably came first based on the 2006 Member Since date on his profile. Whether the Google+ Local page and associated map listing came directly as a result is unknown.

In fact, as you do more and more investigation as to what shows up on the map and what doesn’t it seems like a Google+ Local page is required. However, a fair amount of them have been created by Google. Obviously Google uses a multitude of sources to create these listing. If you can be one of those sources, all the better. But even if you’re not, connecting to these entities delivers value to all involved.

Lets look at another Google Maps result.

If you follow that reviews link you wind up on their Google+ page.

Odd that Google isn’t sucking in the reviews from Zillow, which would show a greater connection. Google+ Local Pages provide a vast database of entities for Google. And they rely on the data in Google+ more than that from other sources.

Here the phone number on Zillow doesn’t match the one on Google+ or Google Maps. A quick aside that you’re also seeing the potential to create a relationship between Keke Jones (person) and Pacific Sotheby’s Int’l Realty (place). But I digress.

Outside of the website connection and address match in that Professional Information section, the other reason this result shows up for this search is because they use Zillow products on their website.

The rest of you can run away of these types of implementations based on poor analysis of a Matt Cutts video if you like, but that would be a mistake in my view.

Okay, one last example. Lets zoom in and find another result.

The hours data indicates that Roger probably has a Google+ Page. Yup.

Now we can see that they’re pulling in reviews from Zillow and Roger does have a profile on Zillow. So why he shows up for a Zillow+Geography search is pretty straight-forward.

Interestingly, searching for ‘homethinking san diego, ca’ on Google Maps does not return Roger Ma. Perhaps because they don’t include an address line 1 or because they only use hreview-aggregate and don’t declare a schema.org scope (thank you handy structured data testing tool bookmarklet).

Tough to say but you can see how important it might be to ensure you did what was necessary to confirm these connections.

People Talk About

Now lets home in (pun intended) on the ‘People talk about’ feature. These terms are generated though some process/algorithm that analyzes the review text and pulls out the relevant (depending on who you ask) key phrases.

Now, I’m not going to go too far down this rabbit hole, though I think it’s possible Google might be using both review text and query syntax to create these phrases. Bill Slawski did a nice job teasing out how Google finds ‘known for’ terms for entities.

What’s important in my view is that these key phrases become more meta information that gets passed back and forth through entity connections.

Google is assigning this entity (Roger Ma) a certain cluster of key phrases including ‘sell a home’ and ‘great realtor’. Zillow is connected to this entity, as we’ve demonstrated, which means that those key phrases are, on some level, applied to Zillow’s page and site.

Now imagine the aggregated key phrases from connected entities that are flowing into Zillow. Do you think that might give Google a better idea of exactly when and for what queries they should return Zillow content?

And Google might very well know the terms people used to get to Roger Ma’s page on Zillow and use that to inform all of the other connected entities. That’s speculation but it’s made with over six months of experimentation and observation.

I can’t share many of the details because I’m under various NDAs, but once you make these connections using structured data there seems to be an increased ability to rank for relevant terms.

SameAs

Okay, we veered off a bit into theory so lets get back to tactics. If you have a page that is about a known entity you may want to use the SameAs schema.org property.

If I had to describe it plainly, I’d say sameAs acts as an entity canonical. Sure, it’s a bit more complicated than that and has a lot to do with confirming identity but in my experience using sameAs properly can be a valuable (and more direct) way of telling search engines what entity that page contains or represents.

Here you see that a page about Leonardo DiCaprio a sameAs property to his Wikipedia entry. Now, obviously you could try to spam this property but there would be a number of ways to catch this type of behavior. Sadly, I know that won’t stop some of you.

Wikipedia

Like it or not Wikipedia is still a primary source of data for the Knowledge Graph. If you’ve got a lot of time, patience and can be objective rather than subjective you can wade into Wikipedia to help create company profiles, provide reference links (more important than you may imagine) and generally ensure that your brand is represented in as many legitimate places as possible.

Your goal here isn’t to spam Wikipedia but to simply crack the Kafka-like nature of Wikipedia moderation and provide a real representation of your site or brand that adds value to the entire corpus and platform.

Freebase

Freebase on the other hand has a different type of challenge. Instead of obstinate editors and human drama, Freebase is just … a byzantine structure of updates. The good news? It’s a direct line to the Knowledge Graph.

For instance if you search for Twitter this is the Knowledge Card you get as a result.

There’s no Google+ part of the Knowledge Card because there is no reference to a Google+ Page under Social Media Presence.

Turns out they don’t have a Google+ Page. Seriously? Man, get with it Twitter. Compare this to StumbleUpon.

They’ve got the business specific information as well as the Google+ integration with the Recent posts unit. Why? They’ve got a Google+ entry in their Social Media Presence on Freebase.

How about Foursquare?

Oy! Not so good. They’ve got their Google+ account in Freebase.

However, the business section on their ‘Inc.’ entry in Freebase (different from the standard entry) is empty.

Now, the interplay between a standard entry and a business entry on Freebase can be strange and some entities don’t even need this dual set-up, which makes understanding how to enter it all really complex. So, it’s not just you who thinks updating Freebase is hard. But … it’s totally worth it.

Because Freebase really is where the Knowledge Graph flows as I’ve just shown. For just one more example, look at the Knowledge Card for Garret Dillahunt and then look at the data in his Freebase entry. Match the elements that show up in the Knowledge Card. Convinced?

You might ask why Google links to Wikipedia in the Knowledge Cards and not Freebase? Have you looked at Freebase!? It’s not a destination site anyone on the Google search team would wish on a user. That and Wikipedia has a solid brand that likely resonates with a majority of users.

KGO

Knowledge Graph Optimization is just getting started but here are the real things (pun intended) you can do to start meeting this new world head on.

Use Entities (aka Nouns) In Your Writing

Make it easy for users and search engines to know what you’re talking about by using the actual names of the entities in your writing.

Get Connected and Link Out To Relevant Sites

Stop hoarding link juice and link out to relevant sites so that the entity information can begin to flow between sites.

Use Structured Data To Increase Entity Detection

Make it easier for search engines to detect, extract and connect entities to the Knowledge Graph by using various forms of structured data.

Go A Step Further and Use the sameAs Property 

When appropriate use the sameAs property to reference the exact Freebase or Wikipedia entry for that entity. Think of it as an entity canonical.

Claim and Optimize Your Google+ Presence

There’s no doubt that Google+ sits in the middle of a lot of the knowledge graph, particularly about places. So claim and optimize your presence, which also extends to getting reviews.

Get Exposure on Wikipedia

Put on some music and slug it out with Wikepedians who seem straight from Monty Python’s Argument sketch and edit your profile and add some appropriate references.

Edit and Update Your Freebase Entry

Update your Freebase entry and make it as complete as possible. I hope to have a more instructive post on editing Freebase some time in the near future.

Knowledge Graph Optimization (KGO) is about making it easy to connect to as many relevant entities as possible so that search engines better understand your site on a ‘thing’ level and can pass important meta information between connected entities.

(This post is a personal post about running Blind Five Year Old, building on similar posts for 2011 and 2012.)

It’s nearly the end of February and I haven’t completed my now annual ‘What I Learned’ post. That should tell you that one of the things I learned is how quickly time gets away from you.

If you’re looking for a post where every problem has an answer with a pretty bright red bow on top then you should click the back button immediately. Because while 2013 was a crazy successful year, it was also messy and confusing.

Success Devours Time

I won’t humble brag. It was a great year for the business. I moved many clients to retainers and wound up working with three top 50 web properties according to comScore. The work was interesting and challenging, revenue was up and I was more than comfortable financially.

Yet, success introduced new problems. If you’d like to play the smallest violin now, please go ahead. I get it. It feels strange to complain about success. Yet, here I am about to do that. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want the opposite. But here is my reality.

More clients meant more client work. A lot more. The result? I had a choice. Dial down the time I spent learning or building the brand. When I got serious about the business back in 2010 my ratio of client work to learning and brand building was 50/50. For me, the choice was obvious.

I spent far less time building the brand. One only need look at the number of blog posts to see how my output diminished. Mind you, I made the most out of the blog posts I did manage to publish. But it was an anemic year in terms of output and that bothers me not just from a business perspective but because I enjoy writing.

Perfectionism Works (For Me)

Part of the problem is that I’m a perfectionist. I’d probably tell you I simply had “very high standards for the quality of my work” and I could even talk myself into believing that. But it probably looks a hell of a lot like perfectionism.

So at the beginning of 2013 I was hell bent on embracing the ‘done is better than perfect’ mantra. Jonathon Colman would be proud. But you know what? Didn’t happen.

Not only that, but all the evidence seemed to indicate that spending that extra time to make my work that much better … paid off. Even if I was late delivering the work (which happened more often than I’d like), the quality of the work was such that it carried the day. The delay was suddenly explainable given the quality and success of the recommendations.

Yes, you still have to produce results. And I did.

Sales Avalanche

Having a sales funnel is important. You don’t want a client or two go dark and suddenly be struggling. I had this mentality as I spun up the business. Yet, in 2013 I was actively turning away business. This sounds and feels ugly since I know others aren’t in the same situation.

Most of the clients I wound up taking on were through referrals. Why did I get these referrals? Because of the quality of my work. Work that I’d taken a lot of time to get just right. That’s what I’ve learned. Great work creates … more work.

There are other factors involved in this sales windfall. One is the fact that I’ve created an sort of A-Team perception.

If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find them….maybe you can hire The A-Team.

I don’t blog on traditional platforms to gain exposure, though you might find me referenced there (and I’m very grateful to those authors for doing so.) Hopefully I continue to create content that merits these links from talented professionals.

But the clients I want are looking for the person behind the scenes. The guy who isn’t on all those crazy industry blogs you can’t trust. Now, that’s not how I think of them but that’s how a lot of the people I want to work for think about them. So instead they ask their colleagues if they know someone they can trust.

Scarcity is a powerful marketing tactic.

In addition, there’s a supply and demand issue in the digital marketing industry, with way more demand than (good) supply. This was driven home to me in a conversation with Mike Ramsey at SMX Advanced last year.

He asked me whether I had ever done any traditional advertising for the business. Never, I responded. He then asked me if I could name another industry where you could build a successful business without advertising. I couldn’t.

Juggling Fail

So what this all adds up to is that things fall off the plate. You can only juggle so many things. You’re response time to email goes up. You deliver work late. The smaller requests for your time may go ignored.

It makes me feel fucking awful.

I still try very hard to get back to as many people as possible. To answer questions. To respond to every blog comment. Yet, there are only so many hours in the day and I’m not a workaholic. My wife might disagree with that statement since I work 7 days a week. But it’s not 10 hours a day. And it’s on my own schedule. If I want to binge watch House of Cards I can do that.

Right now I simply have to acknowledge that I’m going to drop the ball here and there. I’m not Superman.

Don’t Think About Doing It

One of the ways I was able to become more productive was to catch myself when I began to think about doing something. I’d think about returning that email. Or I would begin to compose a blog post in my head. Or I’d ruminate about the steps I needed to take for an upcoming audit.

Thinking about these things took up a lot of time. Time I could spend actually getting work done. And in the case of blogging, once I’d written it in my head I was far less passionate about putting it down on ‘paper’.

So I made a real effort to start doing what I was thinking about doing. I haven’t mastered this and sometimes realize I’ve been thinking about doing instead of actually doing for a the last 15 minutes. But I’ve gotten a lot better.

I find that doing something in the physical world helps a lot. Taking something from my honey-do list, something as simple as folding and putting away my clothes, can help to put me back on the right track.

Are We There Complacent Yet?

I’m probably not as paranoid as Bill Gates or Steve Jobs were when they were at the top of their game. But I try very hard not to get complacent. I shouldn’t feel like I can get away with delivering an audit late. But the thought creeps into my mind as I juggle commitments and that’s a bad place to be. Because at some point that’s going to bite me in the ass. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow. But it will.

It already did to some degree.

At the beginning of 2012 I began writing Marketing Biz for Marketing Land. In 2013 I started to get paid for that work. By March I was spending more time than I’d like on it (getting paid for it made me want to do it better), my interest waned and there were some creative differences about the column. Nothing serious but it was mutually decided it would be best to shutter Marketing Biz.

I stayed on and helped out with the Period Table of SEO Success Factors. I was proud of and enjoyed that work. But I dropped the ball on the next project and was quickly asked if I had enough time to continue and I gratefully took the opportunity to say no.

I tried to do too much and wanted to keep that working relationship with Danny Sullivan and Matt McGee. Not because of the connections they have (screw that) but because they’re just smart, good people. So leaving on those terms sucked.

Exposure vs Scarcity

The selling point for doing all of the above was, to some degree, exposure. In our industry you don’t get much bigger than Search Engine Land and Marketing Land. (Though I was proud as a peacock to get one of my posts on Techmeme last year.)

I thought of Marketing Biz as a natural out-growth of my normal curation activities. Not only that but it wasn’t content I would have put on my own blog. So Marketing Biz was my own little place where I might build a reputation and exposure beyond traditional SEO.

That was different than writing a guest post or even being a contributing writer doing one of the usual editing jobs. It didn’t violate my thoughts on guest blogging. It helped that I wasn’t after more exposure at that point, but I’d like to think if I had to do it all over again that I’d do it the same way.

The real question was did I need more exposure? I was turning away business as it stood. I wasn’t eager to drive more people to my door just so I could say no or, even worse, take on additional business and juggle even more work.

Obviously I need to continue to build my reputation, but I’m not sure that’s accomplished by heaping on more and more exposure.  I don’t want to fade away completely and I grok the mere exposure effect. You need to have some degree of mindshare. But I don’t feel the need to be trending all the time.

I haven’t figured out the balance yet. But I do know this. I  want to continue to earn my reputation not coast on it.

Scaling Experiments

Three years ago I had the opportunity to chat with Wil Reynolds. He admitted that he never really thought he’d scale SEER to its current size. But people came to him asking for his help and he wanted to say yes. The only way he could was to bring more people on board. I understand where he’s coming from. Totally.

Yet, I also know I’m not cut out to run a big operation (alone). I don’t enjoy managing people. Well, some people I do. (Hello Keith, Kirby and Jeremy!) But I have a really short fuse when it comes to effort and the ability to pick up new material.

Keep up with and (better yet) challenge me and I’m a great boss. Fall behind and make me explain something twice and I’ll make your life a living hell.

But 2013 was the year that I was going to experiment. I didn’t hire anyone. That’s a huge step! But I did bring a few people on Voltron style on specific jobs. They’d do a fair chunk of the audit punch list and I’d review, edit and add to it as well as do most of the client interaction and presentation.

It worked okay but it didn’t save me as much time as I had hoped. Maybe that would get better as I worked with them more and I’m still open to it to a certain degree. Admittedly, it did feel good to write and send those checks at the end of the project.

I’m just not sure scaling satisfies me. I might be able to make more money but the incremental amount doesn’t seem like enough unless I loosened my grip on the work product and took on a lot more clients. I’m not really prepared to do that. I want to be involved in the client work. I want to unlock the riddles and chase down the red herrings.

This year I’ll be experimenting with other ways of scaling.

Friends

Despite a lot of the negativity in the industry, and there’s a lot to be negative about, I found a number of colleagues who supported, encouraged and inspired me.

Whether it was someone like Dennis Goedegebuure giving me a good reference to a massive client (which I secured), watching Joel Klettke evolve and hit his stride, chatting with Dan Shure, IMing with Zeph Snapp or plusing with Mark Traphagen, I was reminded of how lucky I am. (I’m leaving a ton of great people out here but I only have so much space. But the entire community of those who link, Tweet, comment, plus and generally support me continues to overwhelm me.)

I want to be the same person I was when I met these people. Or as close to the same person as I can be, since you’re constantly evolving as a person. I recognize that getting out there, following the golden rule and staying grounded is essential.

I don’t ever want to feel like I’m too cool for school.

And for someone who works at home, having these relationships is huge. Don’t get me wrong, I love working at home. The days I have to drive to a client on the Peninsula or when we’re driving back from my daughter’s tennis class during rush hour remind me just how much I abhor commuting.

But normal interactions, both work related and off-topic, help to break things up and keep you connected. Isolation can be a real issue if you’re working at home so making time for real conversation is important.

Organize!

Enough of the trials and tribulations. I had to have done some things right to have gotten here, right? I sure did.

I’m super organized. I have a digital filing system so I never have to wonder where to find something. I have another filing system (very limited) for my payables and receivables. Nearly everyday I clean up my desktop and make sure nothing builds up.

I live by my Google calendar and I often block off time for client work, making it easy for me to get focused and not schedule too many meetings that require context switching and reduce productivity.

I also refined a whole bunch of business templates so that I have off-the-shelf ready templates for proposals, agreements, kick-off notes, audits, guides and invoices. For some I even have a few different flavors based on the type of engagement. Doing all of this work up front makes a big difference.

Sometimes it feels like I’m tidying up as a form of procrastination but being organized makes me feel calm and that’s important.

Sweat

I kept the weight off this year for the most part, got a Fitbit and stayed active. It’s great going into the garage, getting onto our elliptical machine and sweating for 45 minutes as you stream an episode of Arrow on Netflix. Seriously, how cool is technology?!

I also took up tennis. I’d played here and there and my wife played in high school and a wee bit in college. But it was watching my daughter take classes from Coach Joe that really got both my wife and I back into it. Let me tell you, you can learn and pick up a lot just by watching a very talented, passionate and personable tennis pro teach others. (There’s a lesson here about learning overall if you’re paying attention.)

Exercise helps clear my head and helps me solve problems. It’s a lubricant of sorts, allowing me to unclog a whole bunch of mental blocks.

Best Job Ever

Despite my bitching and moaning, this is the best job I’ve ever had and I sometimes take a step back and am amazed, a goofy smile rising to my face. I make good money working with great clients doing something I genuinely like doing from the comfort of my own home. Jackpot!

But the real treasure has been spending time with my wife and really being here for my daughter as she grows up. Yesterday when she got home she told me about a new game she and her friends made up at school called Monkey In The Middle Two Square. (The rules are quite complicated.) Late last this year I attended her geography bee and even had to cancel a phone call because who knew a geography bee would take nearly two hours!

Do I have all the answers on how my business will evolve? Nope. And that’s okay. Anyone who tells you they have it all figured out is either stupid or lying (or both.)

2014

This year I look forward to blogging more. I’m going to talk about attention hacking and argue against the filter bubble among other things. I want to attend and potentially speak at Pubcon Las Vegas.

I’ll look to pivot some of the business into being a start-up marketing advisor. Because it turns out I have a pretty good track record helping start-ups secure another round of funding or positive exit.

Of course I also want to continue to help my clients to crush their business goals. But most importantly, I plan to stay healthy, happy, optimistic and connected. Something I wish for all of you reading as well.

Every waking minute of every day we choose to do one thing or another.

For a long time we didn’t have many choices. Hunt the mammoths or mind the fire. Read the bible or tend the crops. I can remember when we only got six television stations on an old black and white TV.

But as technology advances we’re afforded more choices more often.

We can decide to talk about the weather with the person next to us in the doctor’s waiting room or stare into our phone and chuckle at a stupid BuzzFeed article. We can focus on that Excel spreadsheet or we can scroll through our Facebook feed.

You can sit on the couch and watch The Blacklist or you can sit on that same couch and read Gridlinked by Neal Asher on a Kindle. You could go out and play tennis or you could go out and play Ingress and hack some portals.

I was going to overwhelm you with statistics that showed how many choices we have in today’s digital society, such as the fact that the typical email subscriber gets 416 commercial emails every month. That’s more than 10 a day!

I could go on and on because there’s a litany of surveys and data that tell the same story. But … we all know this from experience. We live and breath it every day.

We all choose to look, hear and do only so many things. Because there are only so many hours in each day.

Our time and attention is becoming our most valued resource. (Frankly, we should really guard it far more fiercely than we do.) As marketers we must understand and adapt to this evolving environment. But … it’s not new.

The Attention Auction

There’s always been an auction on attention. That critical point in time where people decide to give their attention to one thing over the other.

Recently, there’s been quite a kerfluffle over the idea of content shock. That there’s too much content. There are some interesting points in that debate but I tend to believe the number of times content comes up in the auction has increased quite a bit. We consume far more content due to ubiquitous access.

Sure there’s more content vying for attention. But there are more opportunities to engage and a large amount of content never comes up in the auction because of poor quality or mismatched interest.

There are hundreds of TV channels but really only a handful that are contextually relevant to you at any given time. Even if there are 68 sports channels the odds that you are in the mood to watch sports and that there will be something on each of those stations at the same time that you want to watch is very small. If you’re looking to watch NFL Football then Women’s College Badminton isn’t really an option.

More importantly, I believe that we’ve adapted to the influx of content. It’s knowing how we’ve adapted that can help marketers win the attention auction more often.

We Are Internet Old!

Adolescents often do very reckless things. They run red lights. They engage in binge drinking. They have unprotected sex. While some point to brain development as the cause (and there’s some truth to that), I tend to believe Dr. Valerie Reyna has it right.

The researchers found that while adults scarcely think about engaging in many high-risk behaviors because they intuitively grasp the risks, adolescents take the time to mull over the risks and benefits.

It’s not that adolescents don’t weigh the pros and cons. They do and actually overestimate the potential cons. But despite that, they choose to play the odds and risk it more often than adults. In large part, this can be attributed to less life experience. They’ve had fewer opportunities to land on the proverbial whammy.

As we grow older we actually think less about many decisions because we have more experience and we can make what is referred to as ‘gist’ decisions. From my perspective it simply means we grok the general idea and can quickly say yea or nay.

So what does any of this have to do with the Internet, attention or content?

When it comes to consuming digital content, we’re old. We’ve had plenty of opportunities to experience all sorts of content to the point where we don’t have to think too hard about whether we’re going to click or not. If it fits a certain pattern we have a certain response.

Nay! A thousand times nay.

The vast majority of content being produced is, to put it bluntly, crap. Technology has a lot to do with this. It is both easy and free to create content in written or visual formats. From WordPress to Tumblr to Instagram, nearly anyone can add to the content tidal wave.

Of course, the popularity of ‘content marketing’ has increased the number of bland, “me too” articles, not to mention the eyesore round-up posts that are a simulacrum of true curation.

People have wasted too much time and attention on shitty content. The result? We’re making decisions faster and faster by relying on those past experiences.

We create internal shortcuts in our mind for what is good or bad. It’s a shortcut that protects us from wasting our time and attention, but may also prevent us from finding new legitimate content. So how do we address this cognitive shortcut? How do you win the attention auction?

You can ensure that you fit that shortcut and you can add yourself to that shortcut.

Fit The Shortcut

Getting Attention

Fitting the shortcut is simple to say, but often difficult to execute. Make sure that, at a glance, you get the attention of your user. There are plenty of ways to do this from writing good titles to using appropriate images to leveraging social sharing.

When ‘1-800 service’ pops up on caller ID you’re probably making a snap decision that it’s a telemarketer and you’ll ignore the call. When it’s the name of your doctor or someone from your family you pick up the phone. This same type of process happens on nearly all social platforms as people scan feeds on Twitter, Google+ and Facebook.

Recently Facebook even admitted to the issues revolving around feed consumption.

The fact that less and less of brands’ content will surface is described as a result of increased competition for limited space, since “content that is eligible to be shown in news feed is increasing at a faster rate than people’s ability to consume it.”

Now this is a bit disingenuous since Facebook is crowding out legitimate content for ads (a whole lot of ads) but the essence of this statement is true. Not only that but your content is at a disadvantage on Facebook since much of the content is personal in nature. Cute pictures of your cousin’s kids are going to trump and squeeze out content from brands.

So with what space you’re left with on these platforms, you better make certain it has the best chance of getting noticed and fitting that shortcut. The thing is, too many still don’t do what’s necessary to give their content the best chance of success.

If you’re not optimizing your social snippet you’re shooting your content in the foot.

Be sure your title is compelling, that you have an eye catching image, that the description is (at a minimum) readable and at best engages and entices. Of course, none of this matters unless that content finds its way to social platforms.

Make sure you’re encouraging social sharing. Don’t make me hunt down where you put the sharing options or jump through hoops once I get there.

Ensure your content is optimized for both social and search. And when you’re doing the latter rely on user centric syntax and intent to guide your optimization efforts.

Your job is to fit into that cognitive shortcut by making it easy for users to see and understand your content in the shortest amount of time possible.

Keeping Attention

Getting them to your content is the first step in winning their attention. At that point they’re giving you the opportunity to take up more of their time and attention. They made a choice but they’re going to be looking to confirm whether it was a good one with almost the same amount of speed.

When you land on a new website you instantly (perhaps unconsciously) make a decision about the quality and authority of that site and whether you’ll stick around.

A websites’ first impression is known to be a crucial moment for capturing the users interest. Within a fraction of time, people build a first visceral “gut feeling” that helps them to decide whether they are going to stay at this place or continue surfing to other sites. Research in this area has been mainly stimulated by a study of Lindgaard et al. (2006), where the authors were able to show that people are able to form stable attractiveness judgments of website screenshots within 50 milliseconds.

That’s from a joint research paper from the University of Basel and Google Switzerland about the role of visual complexity and prototypicality regarding first impression of websites (pdf).

Once they get to the content you need to ensure they instantly get positive reinforcement. Because at the same time there are other pieces of content, other things, battling for attention.

So if they don’t instantly see what they’re looking for you’re giving them a reason to say nope. If what they see on that page looks difficult to read. Nope. If they see grammatical errors. Nope. If they feel the site is spammy looking. Nope.

There is a drum beat of research, examples and terms that underscore the importance of reducing friction.

Call it cognitive fluency or cognitive ease, either way we seek out things that are familiar and look like we expect. Books such as Barry Schwartz’s Paradox of Choice and Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think make it clear that too many choices reduce action and satisfaction. And we should all internalize the fact that the majority of people don’t read but instead skim articles.

That doesn’t mean that the actual content has to suffer. I still write what are considered long-form posts but format them in ways that allow people to get meaning from them without having to read them word for word.

Do I hope they’re poring over every sentence? Absolutely! I’m passionate about my writing and writing in general. But I’m a realist and would prefer that more people learn or take something from my writing than have a select few read every word and laud me for sentence construction.

I still point people to my post on readability as a way to get started down this road. Make no mistake, those who optimize for readability will succeed (even with lesser content) than those that refuse to do so out of ego or other rationalizations (I’m looking at you Google blogs).

I will shout in the face of the next person who whines that they shouldn’t have to use an image in their post or that they only want people who are ‘serious about the subject’ to read their article. Wake up before you’re the Geocities of the Internet.

The one thing I do know is that being authentic and having a personality can help you stand out. It can help you to at least get and retain attention and sometimes even become memorable. Here’s a bit of writing advice from Charles Stross.

Third and final piece of advice: never commit to writing something at novel length that you aren’t at least halfway in love with. Because if you’re phoning it in, your readers will spot it and throw rotten tomatoes at you. And because there’s no doom for a creative artist that’s as dismal as being chained to a treadmill and forced to play a tune they secretly hate for the rest of their working lives.

The emphasis is mine. Don’t. Phone. It. In.

Add To The Shortcut

Using Attention

When you do get someone’s attention, what are you doing with it? You want them to add your site, product or brand to that cognitive shortcut. So the next time a piece of that content comes up in the attention auction you’ve got the inside track. They recognize it and select it intuitively.

For instance, every time I see something new from Matthew Inman of The Oatmeal, I give it my attention. He’s delivered quality and memorable content enough times that he doesn’t have to fight so hard for my attention. I have a preconceived notion of quality that I bring to each successive interaction with his content.

Welcome to branding 101.

Consistently creating positive and memorable interactions (across multiple channels) will cause users to associate your site, product or brand as being worthy of attention.

Let me be more explicit about that term ‘interactions’. Every time you’re up in the attention auction counts as an interaction. So if I choose to pass on reading your content, that counts and not in a good way. We’re creatures of habit so the more times I pass on something the more likely I am to continue passing on it.

Add to that the perception (or reality) that we have less time per piece of content and each opportunity you have to get in front of a user is critical.

Now, if I actually get someone to share a piece of content, will it be presented in a way that will win the attention auction? If it isn’t not only have I squandered that user action but I may have created a disincentive for sharing in the future. If I share something and no one gives me a virtual high five of thanks for doing so will I continue to share content from that source?

Poor social snippet optimization is like putting a kick-me sign on your user’s back.

Memorable

If you want to be added to that cognitive shortcut you need to make it easy for them to do so. You need them to remember and remember in the ‘right’ way.

I’ve read quite a bit lately about ensuring your content is useful. I find this bit of advice exceedingly dull. I mean, are you creating content to be useless? I’m sure content spammers might but by in large most aren’t. Not only that but there’s plenty of great content that isn’t traditionally useful unless you count tickling the funny bone as useful.

Of course you’ve also probably read about how tapping into emotion can propel your content to the top! Well, there’s some truth to that but that’s often at odds with being useful such as creating a handy bookmarklet or a tutorial on Excel. I suppose you could link it to frustration but you’re not going to have some Dove soap tear-jerker piece mashed up with Excel functions. Even Annie Cushing can’t pull that off.

Story telling is also a fantastic device but it’s not a silver bullet either. Mind you, I think it has a better chance than most but even then you’re really retaining attention instead of increasing memory.

You have to make your content cocktail party ready. Your content has to roll off the tongue in conversation.

I read this piece on Global Warming in The New York Times.

I heard this song by Katy Perry about believing in yourself.

I saw this funny ad where Will Ferrell tosses eggs at a Dodge.

Seriously, when you’re done with a piece of your content, describe it to someone out loud in one sentence. That’s what it’ll be reduced to for the most part.

As humans we categorize or tag things so we can easily recall them. I think the scientific term here is ‘coding’ of information. If we can’t easily do so it’s tough for us to talk about them again, much less find them again. As an aside, re-finding content is something we do far more often than we realize and is something Google continues to try to solve.

Even when we can easily categorize and file away that bit of information, we’re not divvying it up into a very fine structure. Only the highlights make it into memory. We only take a few things from the source information. A sort of whisper down the lane effect takes place. You suddenly don’t remember who wrote it, or where you saw it.

We’re trying to optimize the ability to recall that information by using the right coding structure, one that we’ll be able to remember.

It’s the reason you need to be careful about if or how you go about guest blogging. This is also why I generally despise (strong word I know) Infographics. Because more often than not if you hear someone refer to one they say ‘That Infographic on Water Conservation’ or ‘That Infographic on The History of Beer’.

Guess what, they have no clue where they saw it or what brand it represents. Seriously. Because usually the only two things remembered are the format (Infographic) and the topic. When I ask people to name the brands behind Infographics I usually get two responses: Mint and OK Cupid. Kudos to them but a big raspberry for the rest of you.

“But the links” I hear some of you moan. Stop. Stop it right now! That lame ass link (no don’t tell me about the DA number) is nothing compared to the attention you just squandered.

I’m not saying that Infographics can’t work, but they have to be done thoughtfully, for the right reasons and to support your brand. Okay, rant over.

Ensuring people walk away with a concise meaning increases satisfaction. And getting them to repeat it to someone else helps secure your content in memory. The act of sharing helps add your site or brand to that user’s shortcut.

If there were a formula you could follow that would guarantee great content, why is there so much crap? If we all knew what makes a hit song or a hit movie why isn’t every song and film a success? This isn’t easy and anyone telling you different is lying.

Consistent

You can also add to the shortcut by creating an expectation. This can be around the quality of your content but that’s pretty tough to execute on. I mean, I completely failed at generating enough blog content last year. I’m not advocating a paint-by-numbers schedule, but I had more to say and at some point if you’re name isn’t out there they begin to forget you.

There’s a fair amount of research that shows that memory is a new mapping of neurons and that the path becomes stronger with repeated exposure. You inherently know this by studying. The more you study the more you remember.

But what if the memory of your site or brand, that path you’re creating in your user’s mind, isn’t clear. What if the first time you associate the brand with one thing and the next time it’s not quite that thing you thought it was. Or that the time between exposures is so great that you can’t find that path anymore and inadvertently create a new path. How many times have you saved something only to realize you already saved it at some point in the past?

Now, I’m out there in other ways. I keep my Twitter feed going with what I hope is a great source of curated content across a number of industries. My Google+ feed is full of the same plus a whole bunch of other content that serves as a sort of juxtaposition to the industry specific content.

One of the more successful endeavors on Google+ is my #ididnotwakeupin series where I share photos from places around the world. It’s a way for me to vicariously travel. So every morning for more than two years I’ve posted a photo tagged with #ididnotwakeupin.

The series gets a decent amount of engagement and if I tried harder (i.e. – interacted with other travel and photography folks) I’m pretty sure I could turn it into something bigger. I even had an idea of turning it into a coffee table book. I haven’t though. Why? Because there’s only so much time in every day. See what I did there?

Another example of this is Moz’s Whiteboard Friday series. You aren’t even sure what the topic is going to be but over time people expect it to be good so they tune in.

Or there’s Daily Grace It’s Grace on YouTube where people expect and get a new video from Grace Helbig every Monday through Friday. Want to double-down on consistent? Tell me what phrase you remember after watching this video from Grace (might be NSFW depending on your sensitivity).

Very … yeah, you know.

That’s right. Repetition isn’t a bad thing. The mere exposure effect demonstrates that the more times we’re exposed to something the better chance we’ll wind up liking it. This is what so many digital marketing gurus don’t want you to hear.

Saturation marketing (still) works because more exposure equals familiarity which improves cognitive fluency which makes it easier to remember.

It’s sort of like the chorus in a song, right? Maybe you don’t know all the words to each verse but you know the chorus! Particularly if you can’t get away from hearing it on the radio every 38 minutes.

In some ways, the number of exposures necessary is inversely proportional to the quality of the content. Great content or ads don’t need much repetition but for me to know that it’s JanuANY at Subway this month might take a while.

And the biggest mistake I see people make is stopping. “We blogged for a few months and saw some progress but not enough to keep investing in it.” This is like stopping your new diet and exercise regimen because you only lost 6 pounds.

You always have to be out there securing and reinforcing your brand as a cognitive shortcut.

Does Pepsi decide that they just don’t need to do any more advertising? Everyone knows about Pepsi so why spend a billion dollars each year marketing it? You just can’t coast. Well, you can, but you’re taking a huge risk. Because someone or something else might fill the void. (Note to self, I need to take this advice.)

Shared

The act of sharing content likely means it will be remembered. To me it’s almost like having to describe that content in your head again as you share it. You have that small moment where you have to ask questions about what you’re sharing, with who and why it’s interesting.

So sharing isn’t just about getting your content in front of other people it’s helping to cement your content in the mind of that user.

Of course, having the same piece of content float in front of your face a number of times from different sources helps tremendously. Not only are you hitting on the mere exposure effect you’re also introducing some social proof to the equation.

To me the goal isn’t really to ‘go viral’ but to increase the number of times I’m winning the attention auction by getting there more often with an endorsement.

You might not click on that ‘What City Should You Actually Live In?‘ quiz on Facebook the first time but after four people have posted their answers you just might cave and click through. (Barcelona by they way.)

Examples

Breaking Bad

How did Breaking Bad become such a huge hit? It wasn’t when it first started out. I didn’t watch the first two seasons live.

But enough people did and AMC kept the faith and kept going. Because enough people were talking about it. It was easy to talk about too. “This show where a chemistry teacher becomes a meth dealer.” Bonus points that the plot made it stand out from anything else on TV.

And then you figured out that you could watch it on Netflix! People gave it a try. Then they began to binge watch seasons and they were converts. They wanted more. MOAR!

Of course none of it would have happened if it weren’t a great show. But Breaking Bad was also consistent, persistent, memorable and available.

BuzzFeed

I know what you’re thinking. BuzzFeed? Come on, their content sucks! And for the most part I’d have to agree. But it’s sort of a guilty pleasure isn’t it?

Here’s why I think BuzzFeed works. You’ve found yourself on a BuzzFeed ‘article’ a number of times. It’s not high quality in most senses of the word but it does often entertain. Not only that it does so very quickly.

If I’m ‘reading’ the 25 Times Anna Kendrick Was Painfully Accurate post I’m only scrolling through briefly and I do get a chuckle or two out of it. This has happened enough times that I know what to expect from BuzzFeed.

I’ve created a cognitive shortcut that tells me that I can safely click-through on a BuzzFeed post because I’ll get a quick laugh out of it. They entertain and they respect my time. For my wife that same function is filled by Happy Place.

Blind Five Year Old

How about my site and personal brand? I’ve done pretty well but it took me quite a while to get there, figuring out a bunch of stuff along the way.

Seriously, I blogged in relative obscurity from 2008 to 2010. But over time the quality of my posts won over a few people. But quality wasn’t enough. I also got better and better at optimizing my content for readability and for sharing.

I use a lot of images in my content. And I spend a lot of time on selecting and placing them. I still think I botched the placement of an image in my Keywords Still Matter post. And it still irks me. No, I’m not joking.

The images make it easier to read. Not only do they give people a rest, they allow me to connect on a different level. Sometimes I might be able to communicate an idea better with the help of that image. It helps to make it all click.

I use a lot of music references as images. Part of it is because I like music but part of it is because if you’re suddenly singing that song in your head, then you’re associating my content with that song, if even just a little. When I do that I have a better chance of you remembering that content. I’ve helped create a tag in your mental filing system.

I try to build more ways for you to connect my content in your head.

TL;DR

We have more choices more often when it comes to content. In response to this we’re protecting our time and attention by making decisions on content faster. Knowing this, marketers must work harder to fit cognitive shortcuts we’ve created, based on experience, for what is perceived as clickable or authoritative content.

Alternatively, the consistent delivery and visibility of memorable content can help marketers create a cognitive shortcut, giving themselves an unfair advantage when their content comes up in the attention auction.